A.2 Changes and New Features

News in 11.88

TeX-PDF-mode is now enabled by default.

Now TeX-previous-error works with TeX commands if the new
option TeX-parse-all-errors is non-nil, which is the default.
When this option is non-nil, an overview of errors and warnings reported
by the TeX compiler can be opened with M-x TeX-error-overview
<RET>.
See Debugging, for details.

Style file authors are encouraged to distinguish common from expert
macros and environments, and mark the latter using
TeX-declare-expert-macros and
LaTeX-declare-expert-environments.

Users can then restrict completion using
TeX-complete-expert-commands.

Management of LaTeX package options in the parser was improved. You
might need to reparse your documents, especially if you loaded the
‘babel’ package with language options.

Now you can insert ‘$...$’ or ‘\(...\)’ by typing a single
$. To do this, customize the new option ‘TeX-electric-math’.
TeX-math-close-double-dollar was removed.
See Quotes, for details.

C-c <RET> documentclass <RET> completes with all available
LaTeX classes, if the TeX-arg-input-file-search variable is
non-nil. Completion for class options of the standard LaTeX classes
is provided as well.

New user options LaTeX-default-author,
LaTeX-fontspec-arg-font-search,
LaTeX-fontspec-font-list-default, TeX-date-format, and
TeX-insert-braces-alist. A new possible value
(show-all-optional-args) for
TeX-insert-macro-default-style was added. The default value of
TeX-source-correlate-method has been changed.

‘biblatex’ support was greatly expanded. If parsing is enabled,
AUCTeX looks at ‘backend’ option to decide whether to use Biber
or BibTeX. The LaTeX-biblatex-use-Biber variable was changed to
be file local only and is no more customizable.

With some LaTeX classes, the default environment suggested by
LaTeX-environment (C-c C-e) when the current environment is
‘document’ was changed. With ‘beamer’ class the default
environment is ‘frame’, with ‘letter’ it is ‘letter’,
with ‘slides’ it is ‘slide’.

Brace pairing feature was enhanced in LaTeX documents. Support for
‘\bigl’, ‘\Bigl’, ‘\biggl’ and ‘\Biggl’, the same
as the one for ‘\left’, was added to TeX-insert-macro.
For example, C-c <RET> bigl <RET> ( <RET> inserts
‘\bigl(\bigr)’.

You can insert brace pair ‘()’, ‘{}’ and ‘[]’ by typing
a single left brace if the new user option
LaTeX-electric-left-right-brace is enabled.

Macros ‘\langle’, ‘\lfloor’ and ‘\lceil’, which produce
the left part of the paired braces, are treated similarly as ‘(’,
‘{’ and ‘[’ during the course of TeX-insert-macro.
See Quotes, for details.

Support for dozens of LaTeX packages was added.

Tabular-like environments (tabular, tabular*, tabularx, tabulary, array,
align, ...) are indented in a nicer and more informative way when the
column values of a table line are written across multiple lines in the
tex file.

The suitable number of ampersands are inserted when you insert array,
tabular and tabular* environments with C-c C-e. Similar
experience is obtained if you terminate rows in these environments with
C-c <LFD>. It supplies line break macro ‘\\’ and inserts
the suitable number of ampersands on the next line.

Commands for narrowing to a group (TeX-narrow-to-group) and to
LaTeX environments (LaTeX-narrow-to-environment) were added.

Now arbitrary options can be passed to the TeX processor on a
per file basis using the TeX-command-extra-options option.
See Processor Options, for details.

Now C-c C-e document <RET>, in an empty document, prompts for
‘\usepackage’ macros in addition to ‘\documentclass’.

TeX-add-style-hook has now a third argument to tell AUCTeX for
which dialect (LaTeX, Texinfo or BibTeX) the style hook is
registers. Labelling style hook by dialect will avoid applying them not
in the right context.

There have been lots of bug fixes and feature additions.

News since 11.87

AUCTeX now supports Biber in conjunction with biblatex in addition to
BibTeX.

Each AUCTeX mode now has its own abbrev table. On Emacsen which
provide the possibility to inherit abbrevs from other tables, the
abbrevs from the Text mode abbrev table are available as well. Newly
defined abbrevs are written to the mode-specific tables, though.

The file ‘tex-fptex.el’ was removed.

Forward/backward search for Evince has been improved. If Emacs is
compiled with DBUS support and a recent Evince version (3.x) is
installed, the communication goes over the desktop bus instead of the
command line, resulting in more accurate positioning of point in Emacs
and highlighting of the target paragraph in Evince.

A problem where Ghostscript threw an /invalidfileaccess error when
running preview-latex was fixed.

A lot of smaller fixes and additions have been made.

News in 11.86

Parsing of LaTeX output was improved. It is now less likely that
AUCTeX opens a non-existent file upon calling TeX-next-error;
a problem for example encountered when using MiKTeX 2.8. In addition
quoted file names as emitted by MiKTeX are now supported.

A new framework for the definition and selection of viewers was
implemented. If you have customizations regarding viewers you will have
to redo them in this new framework or reenable the old one.
See Starting Viewers, for details.

Comprehensive editing support for PSTricks was added.

Support for various LaTeX packages was added, e.g. ‘tabularx’,
‘CJK’, and ‘hyperref’.

An easy way to switch between TeX engines (PDFTeX, LuaTeX,
XeTeX, Omega) was added.

Support for SyncTeX was added. This involves the command line
options for LaTeX and the viewer.

Folding can now be customized to use macro arguments as replacement
text.

‘preview.sty’ now works with XeTeX.

A lot of smaller and larger bugs have been squashed.

News in 11.85

Font locking has been improved significantly. It is now less prone to
color bleeding which could lead to high resource usage. In addition it
now includes information about LaTeX macro syntax and can indicate
syntactically incorrect macros in LaTeX mode.

The license was updated to GPLv3.

Support for the nomencl, flashcards and comment LaTeX packages as
well as the Icelandic language option of babel were added.

Support for folding of math macros was added.

Lots of minor bugs in features and documentation fixed.

News in 11.84

There have been problems with the ‘-without-texmf-dir’ option to
‘configure’ when the value of ‘-with-kpathsea-sep’ was set or
determined for an installation system with a default different from that
of the runtime system. with-kpathsea-sep has been removed; the
setting is now usually determined at runtime.

Due to this and other problems, preview-latex in the released XEmacs
package failed under Windows or with anything except recent 21.5
XEmacsen.

AUCTeX and preview-latex have been changed in order to accommodate
file names containing spaces. preview-latex now tolerates bad
PostScript code polluting the stack (like some Omega fonts).

‘preview.sty’ had in some cases failed to emit PostScript header
specials.

Support for folding of comments was added.

The polish language option of the babel LaTeX package as well as
the polski LaTeX package are now supported. Most notably this means
that AUCTeX will help to insert quotation marks as defined by polish.sty
("`..."') and polski.sty (,,...'').

There has been quite a number of other bug fixes to various features and
documentation across the board.

News in 11.83

The new function TeX-doc provides easy access to documentation
about commands and packages or information related to TeX and friends
in general.
See Documentation.

You can now get rid of generated intermediate and output files by means
of the new ‘Clean’ and ‘Clean All’ entries in
TeX-command-list accessible with C-c C-c or the Command
menu.
See Cleaning.

Support for forward search with PDF files was added. That means you can
jump to a place in the output file corresponding to the position in the
source file.
See Viewing.

Adding support for this feature required the default value of the
variable TeX-output-view-style to be changed. Please make sure
you either remove any customizations overriding the new default or
incorporate the changes into your customizations if you want to use this
feature.

TeX error messages of the -file-line-error kind are now
understood in AUCTeX and preview-latex (parsers are still
separate).

News in 11.82

Support for the MinionPro LaTeX package was added.

Warnings and underfull/overfull boxes are now being indicated in the
echo area after a LaTeX run, if the respective debugging options are
activated with TeX-toggle-debug-warnings (C-c C-t C-w) or
TeX-toggle-debug-bad-boxes (C-c C-t C-b). In this case
TeX-next-error will find these warnings in addition to normal
errors.

The key binding C-c C-w for TeX-toggle-debug-bad-boxes
(which was renamed from TeX-toggle-debug-boxes) now is
deprecated.

AUCTeX now can automatically insert a pair of braces after typing
<_> or <^> in math constructs if the new variable
TeX-electric-sub-and-superscript is set to a non-nil value.

Some language-specific support for French was added. There now is
completion support for the commands provided by the ‘frenchb’ (and
‘francais’) options of the babel LaTeX package and easier input
of French quotation marks (\\og ...\\fg) which can now be
inserted by typing <">.

Completion support for options of some LaTeX packages was added.

Already in version 11.81 the way to activate AUCTeX changed
substantially. This should now be done with (load "auctex.el" nil
t t) instead of the former (require 'tex-site). Related to this
change ‘tex-mik.el’ does not load ‘tex-site.el’ anymore. That
means if you used only (require 'tex-mik) in order to activate
AUCTeX, you have to add (load "auctex.el" nil t t) before the
latter statement.
See Loading the package.

Handling of verbatim constructs was consolidated across AUCTeX. This
resulted in the font-latex-specific variables
font-latex-verb-like-commands, font-latex-verbatim-macros,
and font-latex-verbatim-environments being removed and the more
general variables LaTeX-verbatim-macros-with-delims,
LaTeX-verbatim-macros-with-braces, and
LaTeX-verbatim-environments being added.

The output of a BibTeX run is now checked for warnings and errors,
which are reported in the echo area.

The aliases for font-latex-title-fontify were removed. Use
font-latex-fontify-sectioning instead.

The problem that Japanese macros where broken across lines was fixed.

Various bug fixes.

News in 11.81

LaTeX-mark-section now marks subsections of a given section as
well. The former behavior is available via the prefix argument.

preview-latex which was previously available separately became a
subsystem of AUCTeX. There is no documented provision for building
or installing preview-latex separately. It is still possible to use
and install AUCTeX without preview-latex, however.

The installation procedures have been overhauled and now also install
startup files as part of the process (those had to be copied manually
previously). You are advised to remove previous installations of
AUCTeX and preview-latex before starting the installation
procedure. A standard installation from an unmodified tarball no longer
requires Makeinfo or Perl.

Also note that the way AUCTeX is supposed to be activated changed.
Instead of (require 'tex-site) you should now use (load
"auctex.el" nil t t). While the former method may still work, the new
method has the advantage that you can deactivate a preactivated
AUCTeX with the statement (unload-feature 'tex-site) before
any of its modes have been used. This may be important especially for
site-wide installations.

Support for the babel LaTeX package was added.

Folding a buffer now ensures that the whole buffer is fontified before
the actual folding is carried out. If this results in unbearably long
execution times, you can fall back to the old behavior of relying on
stealth font locking to do this job in the background by customizing the
variable TeX-fold-force-fontify.

Folded content now reveals part of its original text in a tooltip or the
echo area when hovering with the mouse pointer over it.

The language-specific insertion of quotation marks was generalized. The
variables LaTeX-german-open-quote,
LaTeX-german-close-quote, LaTeX-german-quote-after-quote,
LaTeX-italian-open-quote, LaTeX-italian-close-quote, and
LaTeX-italian-quote-after-quote are now obsolete. If you are not
satisfied with the default settings, you should customize
TeX-quote-language-alist instead.

Similar to language-specific quote insertion, AUCTeX now helps you
with hyphens in different languages as well.
See European, for details.

Fill problems in Japanese text introduced in AUCTeX 11.55 were fixed.
AUCTeX tries not to break lines between 1-byte and 2-byte chars.
These features will work in Chinese text, too.

The scaling factor of the fontification of sectioning commands can now
be customized using the variable font-latex-fontify-sectioning.
This variable was previously called font-latex-title-fontify; In
this release we provide an alias but this will disappear in one of the
the next releases. The faces for the sectioning commands are now called
font-latex-sectioning-N-face (N=0…5) instead of
font-latex-title-N-face (N=1…4). Analogously
the names of the variables holding the related keyword lists were
changed from font-latex-title-N-keywords to
font-latex-sectioning-N-keywords.
See Font Locking, for details.
Make sure to adjust your customizations.

Titles in beamer slides marked by the “\frametitle” command are know
displayed with the new face font-latex-slide-title-face. You can
add macros to be highlighted with this face to
font-latex-match-slide-title-keywords.

Of course a lot of bugs have been fixed.

News in 11.55

A bug was fixed which lead to the insertion of trailing whitespace
during filling. In particular extra spaces were added to sentence
endings at the end of lines. You can make this whitespace visible by
setting the variable show-trailing-whitespace to t. If
you want to delete all trailing whitespace in a buffer, type M-x
delete-trailing-whitespace RET.

A bug was fixed which lead to a ‘*Compile-Log*’ buffer popping up
when the first LaTeX file was loaded in an Emacs session.

On some systems the presence of an outdated Emacspeak package lead to
the error message ‘File mode specification error: (error "Variable
binding depth exceeds max-specpdl-size")’. Precautions were added which
prevent this error from happening. But nevertheless, it is advised to
upgrade or uninstall the outdated Emacspeak package.

The value of TeX-macro-global is not determined during
configuration anymore but at load time of AUCTeX. Consequently the
associated configuration option ‘--with-tex-input-dirs’ was
removed.

Support for the LaTeX Japanese classes ‘jsarticle’ and
‘jsbook’ was added.

News in 11.54

The parser (used e.g. for TeX-auto-generate-global) was extended
to recognize keywords common in LaTeX packages and classes, like
“\DeclareRobustCommand” or “\RequirePackage”. Additionally a bug
was fixed which led to duplicate entries in AUCTeX style files.

Folding can now be done for paragraphs and regions besides single
constructs and the whole buffer. With the new TeX-fold-dwim
command content can both be hidden and shown with a single key binding.
In course of these changes new key bindings for unfolding commands where
introduced. The old bindings are still present but will be phased out
in future releases.

Info files of the manual now have a .info extension.

There is an experimental tool bar support now. It is not activated by
default. If you want to use it, add

(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'LaTeX-install-toolbar)

to your init file.

The manual now contains a new chapter “Quick Start”. It explains the
main features and how to use them, and should be enough for a new user
to start using AUCTeX.

A new section “Font Locking” was added to the manual which explains
syntax highlighting in AUCTeX and its customization. Together with
the sections related to folding and outlining, the section is part of
the new chapter “Display”.

Keywords for syntax highlighting of LaTeX constructs to be typeset in
bold, italic or typewriter fonts may now be customized. Besides the
built-in classes, new keyword classes may be added by customizing the
variable ‘font-latex-user-keyword-classes’. The customization
options can be found in the customization group
‘font-latex-keywords’.

Verbatim content is now displayed with the ‘fixed-pitch’ face. (GNU
Emacs only)

Syntax highlighting should not spill out of verbatim content
anymore. (GNU Emacs only)

Verbatim commands like ‘\verb|...|’ will not be broken anymore
during filling.

You can customize the completion for graphic files with
LaTeX-includegraphics-read-file.

Support for the LaTeX packages ‘url’, ‘listings’,
‘jurabib’ and ‘csquotes’ was added with regard to command
completion and syntax highlighting.

Performance of fontification and filling was improved.

Insertion of nodes in Texinfo mode now supports completion of existing
node names.

Setting the variable LaTeX-float to nil now means that you
will not be prompted for the float position of figures and tables. You
can get the old behaviour of nil by setting the variable to
"", i.e. an empty string.
See also Floats.

The XEmacs-specific bug concerning overlays-at was fixed.

Lots of bug fixes.

News in 11.53

The LaTeX math menu can include Unicode characters if your Emacs
built supports it. See the variable
LaTeX-math-menu-unicode, Mathematics.

Bug fixes for XEmacs.

Completion for graphic files in the TeX search path has been added.

start is used for the viewer for MiKTeX and fpTeX.

The variable TeX-fold-preserve-comments can now be customized to
deactivate folding in comments.

News in 11.52

Installation and menus under XEmacs work again (maybe for the first
time).

Fontification of subscripts and superscripts is now disabled when the
fontification engine is not able to support it properly.

Bug fixes in the build process.

News in 11.51

PDFTeX and Source Special support did not work with ConTeXt,
this has been fixed. Similar for Source Special support under Windows.

Omega support has been added.

Bug fixes in the build process.

TeX-fold now supports folding of environments in Texinfo mode.

News in 11.50

The use of source specials when processing or viewing the document can
now be controlled with the new TeX-source-specials minor mode
which can be toggled via an entry in the Command menu or the key binding
C-c C-t C-s. If you have customized the variable
TeX-command-list, you have to re-initialize it for this to work.
This means to open a customization buffer for the variable by typing
M-x customize-variable RET TeX-command-list RET, selecting
“Erase Customization” and do your customization again with the new
default.

The content of the command menu now depends on the mode (plain TeX,
LaTeX, ConTeXt etc.). Any former customization of the variable
TeX-command-list has to be erased. Otherwise the command menu
and the customization will not work correctly.

Support for hiding and auto-revealing macros, e.g. footnotes or
citations, and environments in a buffer was
added, Folding.

You can now control if indentation is done upon typing <RET> by
customizing the variable
TeX-newline-function, Indenting.

Limited support for doc.sty and ltxdoc.cls (‘dtx’
files) was added. The new docTeX mode provides functionality for
editing documentation parts. This includes formatting (indenting and
filling), adding and completion of macros and environments while staying
in comments as well as syntax highlighting. (Please note that the mode
is not finished yet. For example syntax highlighting does not work yet
in XEmacs.)

For macro completion in docTeX mode the AUCTeX style files
‘doc.el’, ‘ltxdoc.el’ and ‘ltx-base.el’ were included.
The latter provides general support for low-level LaTeX macros and
may be used with LaTeX class and style files as well. It is
currently not loaded automatically for those files.

Support for ConTeXt with a separate ConTeXt mode is now included.
Macro definitions for completion are available in Dutch and English.

The filling and indentation code was overhauled and is now able to
format commented parts of the source syntactically correct. Newly
available functionality and customization options are explained in the
manual.

Filling and indentation in XEmacs with preview-latex and activated
previews lead to the insertion of whitespace before multi-line previews.
AUCTeX now contains facilities to prevent this problem.

If TeX-master is set to t, AUCTeX will now query for a
master file only when a new file is opened. Existing files will be left
alone. The new function TeX-master-file-ask (bound to C-c
_ is provided for adding the variable manually.

Sectioning commands are now shown in a larger font on display devices
which support such fontification. The variable
font-latex-title-fontify can be customized to restore the old
appearance, i.e. the usage of a different color instead of a change in
size.

Support for alphanum.sty, beamer.cls, booktabs.sty,
captcont.sty, emp.sty, paralist.sty,
subfigure.sty and units.sty/nicefrac.sty was added.
Credits go to the authors mentioned in the respective AUCTeX style
files.

Inserting graphics with C-c RET \includegraphics RET was improved.
See the variable LaTeX-includegraphics-options-alist.

If LaTeX-default-position is nil, don’t prompt for
position arguments in Tabular-like
environments, see Tabular-like.

Completion for available packages when using C-c RET \usepackage
RET was improved on systems using the kpathsea library.

The commenting functionality was fixed. The separate functions for
commenting and uncommenting were unified in one function for paragraphs
and regions respectively which do both.

Syntax highlighting can be customized to fontify quotes delimited by
either >>German<< or <<French>> quotation marks by changing the variable
font-latex-quotes.

Certain TeX/LaTeX keywords for functions, references, variables
and warnings will now be fontified specially. You may add your own
keywords by customizing the variables
font-latex-match-function-keywords,
font-latex-match-reference-keywords,
font-latex-match-variable-keywords and
font-latex-match-warning-keywords.

If you include the style files ‘german’ or ‘ngerman’ in a
document (directly or via the ‘babel’ package), you should now
customize LaTeX-german-open-quote,
LaTeX-german-close-quote and
LaTeX-german-quote-after-quote instead of TeX-open-quote,
TeX-close-quote and TeX-quote-after-quote if you want to
influence the type of quote insertion.

Upon viewing an output file, the right viewer and command line options
for it are now determined automatically by looking at the extension of
the output file and certain options used in the source file. The
behavior can be adapted or extended respectively by customizing the
variable TeX-output-view-style.

You can control whether TeX-insert-macro (C-c RET) ask for
all optional arguments by customizing the variable
TeX-insert-macro-default-style, Completion.

TeX-run-discard is now able to completely detach a process that
it started.